OTTAWA — A 49-year-old man was arrested early Monday in what appeared to be the stabbing and beating death of a 42-year-old Aylmer woman.
Gatineau police were calling it a “possible domestic” crime, but had not officially said it was a homicide.
“We still consider this as a suspicious death,” spokesman Const. Pierre Lanthier said late Monday evening.
A neighbour called 911 around 8:20 p.m. after hearing a fight in the woman’s Symmes Street apartment. When paramedics arrived, they found the woman suffering from what police described as “very serious injuries.”
The woman was taken to the Gatineau Hospital. She was pronounced dead around 2:30 a.m.
The man was arrested nearby, although police said he wasn’t trying to escape. As of Monday night, he remained in custody. Investigators were expected to meet with prosecutors Tuesday to present their evidence and determine what charges to lay against the man.
Police said the man and woman knew each other; it wasn’t clear how well.
“We cannot confirm if there is a direct link between the 49-year-old man and the 42-year-old woman,” Lanthier said. However, he confirmed that police didn’t expect to make other arrests in the case.
An autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday in Montreal.
“We will wait for the autopsy results before confirming anything,” said Lanthier, declining to specify the nature of the woman’s injuries.
The identity of the woman was not immediately made public.
Rhéal Audin, a neighbourhood resident, said he knows a man who lives upstairs from where the incident took place but that he didn’t know the victim.
Audin was watching hockey on television when he saw police and a fire truck arrive around 8:30 p.m. He said he’d heard no trouble and just thought a fire alarm had gone off at the building. But the police didn’t leave.
He described the three-storey, six-unit apartment complex on Symmes Street as a quiet building. The building is set back from the street and difficult to see from up or down the quiet road about a block north of the landmark British Hotel in the old section of Aylmer. Traffic is sparse, even without orange crime scene tapes that blocked in Monday.
Joanne Down, who lives two blocks away, said it’s a good neighbourhood.
“It’s a mix,” she said. “Old houses where the same family has lived forever, and some rental places” with a higher turnover.
But she said it’s not known as a high-crime neighbourhood.
With files from Meghan Hurley
